MediaTek made an unusual decision with the Dimensity 9300 by not using efficiency cores and packing it with four Cortex-X4 cores instead of one. This raised concerns on whether the Dimensity 9300 will face throttling issues.

Things are not looking good for the Dimensity 9300, as a post on X/Twitter revealed that throttling issues are prevalent on the vivo X100 Pro, which is the first phone to use MediaTek’s 2024 flagship chip.

Looking at the graphs presented on the said photo, the X100 Pro would throttle to 46% of its max performance. What’s worrisome is that one of the cores went down to as low as 0.6Ghz during the stress test. On average, the average clock speed of the Dimensity 9300’s 8 cores are at around 1.2Ghz, which is far below the 3.25Ghz maximum clock speed of its Cortex-X4 Prime Core.

The throttling problem of the Dimensity 9300 reminded us of the problems we encountered with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, where the Xiaomi 12 Pro became very warm after around 20 minutes of playing Genshin Impact at the highest graphics settings. This resulted in our average FPS dropping from around 55 to below 40 when the phone became warm to the touch.

Qualcomm was able to rectify the throttling issue with the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 that utilized TSMC’s 4nm process—which is better than the Samsung 4nm process used on the non-Plus model. We confirmed this after doing a stress test on the realme GT3, where the phone was able to sustain 60FPS at 96% of the time based on results we got at GameBench.

While the Dimensity 9300 uses a TSMC process, the throttling issue is more due to MediaTek’s decision to only use performance cores. While it’s possible for MediaTek to solve this by lowering clock speeds, this would result in the Dimensity 9300 trailing behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Do note that these are early tests, so MediaTek will most likely issue updates with OEMs to improve the Dimensity 9300’s power management.